CNN News from CNN-Transcript

CNN

SHOW: NEWS FROM CNN 12:00

May 10, 2004 Monday

HEADLINE: President Bush Holds Press Briefing at Pentagon; Prisoner Abuse Scandal: First Court-Martial; Interview With Congressman Darrell Issa, Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher

GUESTS: Darrell Issa, Ellen Tauscher

BYLINE: Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash, Barbara Starr, Joe Johns, Ben Wedeman

HIGHLIGHT:
President Bush holds press briefing at Pentagon.; The first court-martial of an Army specialist scheduled to begin next week in Baghdad.; Interview with Congressman Darrell Issa, Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher.;

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The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal not going away apparently anytime soon. Up next, I will speak with two members of the United States Congress, Republican Darrell Issa and Democrat Ellen Tauscher.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

REP. ELLEN TAUSCHER (D), ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE: ... facts really speak much differently. And I'm disappointed that the policies put in place by this administration of having not enough troops in the active duty force, which caused us an over-reliance on the Guard and Reserve, the sense that this administration doesn't really care about international conventions, the comments that this administration made very early on about the Geneva Convention not applying to some people, I think really set the tone that there were responsibilities on the ground in Iraq that didn't apply.

And I think that while I very much support our troops in uniform, I think that this administration does not have a plan for success in Iraq. I don't even know who's going to take over on July 1.

BLITZER: Well, the bottom line, do you want Rumsfeld to resign?

TAUSCHER: No, this is the president's decision. And if the president believes he is doing a good job, the president gets to keep him. But frankly, the secretary has lost all credibility with me.

BLITZER: What about with you, Darrell Issa?

REP. DARRELL ISSA ®, CALIFORNIA: Well, the important question is, did the-were the soldiers in Iraq briefed properly? Did they know what they were doing was wrong? And the answer, of course, is they did know what they were doing is wrong.

BLITZER: How do you know that, Congressman? Because they've said to their lawyers, to their relatives that they were ordered to do so by higher-ups.

ISSA: Well, that's not an excuse. I've been a private, I've been a lieutenant, I've been a captain. At all ranks you get these briefings again and again, and this is without being a military policeman. This is just every soldier gets this briefing, gets very clearly understood what the Geneva Convention's about and what his responsibilities are.

And, you know, at Nuremberg, they used the excuse they were just ordered. We wouldn't accept it there. We're not going to accept it from our military personnel.

And as you can see, we've already got a specialist who is pleading guilty, who is going to do hard time, who's going to lose his rank and pay and be drummed out of the military. And that's just a photographer. There is no question, this is not tolerated in the military. The military is going to do exactly what it would have done if this had not broken, and is that, prosecute those responsible and those who failed to provide leadership.

BLITZER: What about that, Ellen Tauscher? You're a member of the House Armed Services Committee. You heard three hours of testimony from Don Rumsfeld, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Richard Myers, and others on Friday. You've had closed-door briefings as well. Do you agree?

TAUSCHER: Well, this better not be about prosecuting just specialists and privates and six or seven people. This is really about the entire policy of this administration and the kind of chill that we see in the Pentagon right now.

We have too few troops in the active duty military. As I said before, this is an over-reliance on the Guard and Reserve. Forty percent of the troops that will be in Iraq right now will be Guard and Reserve.

They don't have enough equipment. They don't have enough-many of them were told that they were coming home and now they have to stay. This is a bad policy on the war itself.

ISSA: Ellen-Ellen, but we're here to talk about the issue at hand. It's a question...

TAUSCHER: Darrell, if you want to talk about-if you want to talk about it, you better then look at the policy.

ISSA: No, you can look...

TAUSCHER: With all due respect, you are not on the service committee.

ISSA: Ellen, this had absolutely nothing-what happened inside that prison had nothing to do with whether these were reservists or regular active duty soldiers. What they did was wrong. They knew it was wrong.

Those who did it or participated will be punished under UCMJ. Those who should have provided leadership above there-and it's going to go all the way up to general officers-undoubtedly are going to have their careers terminated. That's pretty standard in the military.

A soldier loses a rifle, and a lieutenant loses his commission. That's pretty standard. We have to deal with...

BLITZER: Congressman, let me interrupt, because in the new issue of The New Yorker Magazine, the one that's just out, Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer says that these policies of not only humiliating these prisoners, but-and we've all seen these very, very gruesome picture, the president just called those-the prisoner abuse scandal, he said it was cruel and disgraceful behavior by these U.S. military personnel. He says that he has reason to believe, based on the Taguba report, this major general, Antonio Taguba, who released the original report on it, that there was a systematic order given at least given by someone, unclear by whom. That you had to soften up these detainees from more formal interrogation the next day by either military intelligence, CIA, or these civilian contractors who were brought in for questioning.

I wonder if you'd want to respond to that.

ISSA: Wolf, I have very little doubt that this will go higher, as Ellen said. This is going to go high are than a spec four (ph). This is going to include those people who provided policy leadership or directions that caused this action to be taken.

It doesn't change the fact that the spec four (ph) knew what he was doing was wrong. He should have gone out and said I won't do it, it's not a lawful order. But there's no question that if orders or guidance was given to soften these people up outside of the Geneva Convention, that those people will also be punished. The military will not tolerate these kinds of abuses, just as we will not tolerate it when others abuse our soldiers.

BLITZER: All right. Congresswoman Tauscher, hold your fire, because we're going to take a quick break. We have a lot more to discuss on this issue. Two members of Congress, Darrell Issa, Ellen Tauscher, they'll rejoin us right after a short break.

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BLITZER: Welcome back. Our congressional correspondent, Joe Johns, getting new information now on the latest developments up on Capitol Hill and the investigation into the prisoner abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Joe, what have you learned?

JOHNS: Sources with the Senate Armed Services Committee now confirm that the witness list is set for tomorrow's hearing here on Capitol Hill related to those abuses in Iraq. CNN has been told that General Antonio M. Taguba, who is the person who wrote that damning 53-page report that has been read and re-read across the world regarding abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, will be the leading witness. He is expected to testify tomorrow at 9:30 in the morning.

In the afternoon, CNN has been told a number of other witnesses from the military focusing on the issue of intelligence are also expected to testify. Again, Wolf, at this hour, the important information, General Antonio Taguba is expected to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee starting around 9:30 tomorrow morning-Wolf.

BLITZER: Joe, I assume that hearing will be open to the press. It won't be behind closed doors, is that right?

JOHNS: That's our understanding. It is being held out to us as an opening hearing. No one has said it is closed-Wolf.

BLITZER: All right. Joe Johns, we'll be watching that with you tomorrow, with many of our viewers, I assume as well. Joe Johns, our congressional correspondent, breaking that news for us here on CNN.

Let's get back to you are congressional guests, Representatives Ellen Tauscher and Darrell Issa, both of California. One's a Democrat, the other is a Republican.

Ellen Tauscher, let me begin with you. What do you make of that news, that General Taguba will be before the Senate Armed Service Committee, I assume before your commit, the House Armed Services Committee, at some point as well?

TAUSCHER: Well, I certainly hope so. I think one of the most stunning parts of all of this was that Congress was kept completely in the dark for months about this. And I know that there's a reason to keep criminal investigations quiet and to protect people that are being prosecuted. But for god sakes, I think we all knew how inflammatory these photographs would be, that they couldn't be kept under wraps.

And what we all really know is that clean air and sunlight are the best antiseptic. And that's why these photographs and videotapes have to be put out. Congress needs to be able to see them as soon as people, and the American people need to be able to see them so we can really understand the enormity and the scope of the problem, understand who should have known and make sure that not just privates and specialists are prosecuted.

BLITZER: Congressman Issa, do you want those photographs and videotape or tapes to be made public?

ISSA: No, I don't. I believe that they certainly should be available to members of Congress. They should be available to the people that have to make decisions on reforms.

Airing them to the Arab world, enough has been seen to show that this was despicable conduct. It's something we'll be recovering from in the Arab world for many years to come. But the first and most important way to recover is to have a public airing not of pictures, but of how America uses its laws appropriately, measured to punish people who do wrong.

And I think that as this progresses in the military court system, and the federal court system, we're going to see the kind of outcome that we should have. Whatever goes on, to be honest, in public across the airwaves, is simply inciting Arabs to say, you see, look at all the bad things they did.

The point isn't did we do bad things. America has a lot to be ashamed of right now for what went on in that prison. What's important, though is how we deal with the specialists, the privates, the lieutenants, and anyone else who was involved in this atrocity.

BLITZER: Ellen Tauscher, I want to put up on the screen and show our viewers, these seven young soldiers who are now accused of various charges. If you take a look at their names and their pictures, you'll see there are four men, three women. They sort of look like America, the young people who were there. And all of them, virtually all of them-and we've done extensive research on interviews with their loved ones, their relatives, their friends back in their home towns, whether in West Virginia or Maryland or anyplace else around country, say they have no way-they can't understand how it's possible that these people did, allegedly, what they're at least seen as having done in these pictures.

As you look at those young faces, what goes through your mind?

TAUSCHER: They are the face of America, Wolf. And not only that, they're smiling just as they are in the pictures. And that's why when my colleague says, you know, well let's just keep this investigation quiet, let's recover, we can't recover, by the way, if we're looking like we're covering up. And these young men and women were smiling in those pictures because they believed they were doing the right thing.

(CROSSTALK)

ISSA: Ellen, you understand you can't make that assumption.

TAUSCHER: And I don't believe that any of them believed that they thought they were going to get into trouble for doing what they were doing in these pictures. There's a sense of hilarity in these pictures, and that is completely against what they were meant to be told. This is against the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

ISSA: Ellen, you are making an assumption that just is not...

TAUCHER: I'm not making an assumption.

ISSA: No, look, the fact...

TAUSCHER: Darrell, let me finish.

ISSA: ... is, they are grinning to the camera...

TAUSCHER: They're grinning to the camera.

ISSA: ... might mean that, in fact, they thought arrogantly they could get away with the violations of the UCMJ.

TAUSCHER: Really? Or could it also mean, by the way-could it also mean that they thought they weren't going to be covered?

ISSA: They knew what they were doing was wrong. They should have known because they were taught that. More importantly, when you're a military policeman, you really do have an obligation to protect people in your custody.

We have cops in America, some of them with 15 or 20 years that go the wrong way sometimes and abuse prisoners. This happens in America. What makes America different is we won't tolerate it. We won't tolerate those who do it, or those who imply it is OK to do.

BLITZER: Congressman Issa, Seymour Hersh in the article in The New Yorker, and on CNN's "LATE EDITION" yesterday, said that the photographs, the pictures that were taken, he has come to conclude were sanctioned. That these weren't just soldiers randomly taking picture, but they wanted to take the pictures to show these pictures to these detainees, to these Iraqi prisoners to humiliate them and to say to them as a warning, if you don't talk, if you don't tell everything you know, we're going to take these pictures, showing you with masturbation, with women's panties on your head, all of these humiliating and degrading pictures, we're going to take them and show them to your relatives, to show them to your friends, and you're never going to be able to walk in a street in your hometown again. That this was not random, that this was a policy.

ISSA: Well, and, Wolf, that's what concerns me the most here. And the reason that we have to go through the process of not just going after the specialists-you know, this one that's going to be tried-or going to be sentenced probably on the 19th, he's pleading guilty and he is cooperating, is my understanding.

We're going to need to know after he pleads and gets his sentence, who told him, what they told him, when they told him. And that's in process. And these privates and specialists did something wrong, knew they did something wrong. However, they're going to be the beginning of the trip upstream to find out who might have done-set a policy or implied that this was OK.

And those people will also be punished. In some cases, criminally. And if we can't reach them under our existing laws, clearly they will be punished within the-their careers.

But I suspect that we will have criminal prosecutions for those who imply that this policy in any way, shape or form was acceptable. The president, the secretary of state, and the chairman and all of the other joint chiefs have made it very clear, this is wrong.

So at the top we've said it's wrong, at the bottom they're being convicted, and in between we're going to find everyone who participated. That's what we need to do. And it's not airing the pictures that's going to make that happen. It's airing the facts of how this came to happen and to make sure it never happens again in the United States military or in any operation we're involved in.

BLITZER: All right. We will pick that up thought with Ellen Tauscher, but we're going to take another quick break. More of our conversation when we come back.

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BLITZER: If you've been watching CNN, you heard the president of the United States only within the past hour or so say that the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is doing a superb job as the secretary of defense. "He's a strong secretary of defense," the president says. "Our nation owes you"-he said looking at him-"a debt of gratitude."

We're continuing our conversation with two members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Democrat, Ellen Tauscher; the Republican, Darrell Issa.

Let me begin, Ellen Tauscher, with you this time. Listen precisely to what Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said only yesterday in connection with this scandal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN (D), DELAWARE: The president seems to be pretty tone deaf on this. This is a man who usually speaks with moral clarity. And I think we should be doing everything from bringing in the International Red Cross and opening up the prisons, putting monitors in them right now. We should be announcing that we're prepared to literally bulldoze down that prison, which is a symbol of Saddam's torture, as well as ours.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: On the other hand, the former defense secretary-former secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, said yesterday on CNN's "LATE EDITION"-he said, "Enough hand-wringing. The American people have already apologized. The president has apologized. The defense secretary has apologized. It's time to move on."

What do you say?

TAUSCHER: Well, I wish we could move on to a plan for success in Iraq. And unfortunately, I still don't know who's going to take over on July 1, who's going to be in charge of our troops there.

We're going to have a political solution and public diplomacy now turned over to another interim government that's another sense of sovereignty light. We're going to have a huge embassy there, but I don't know what the terms of engagement will be for our troops there.

Is this new government going to allow us to have the convoys come up from Kuwait to replenish supplies and ammunition? Are we going to have take off and landing rights out of the Baghdad airport? These are normally called status of forces agreements. We negotiate them wherever we have troops in the world. We can't negotiate long with this new interim government because we don't who know they are, because we basically had to allow the U.N., Lakhdar Brahimi, go in and pick who these people are because we did such a bad job the last time.

BLITZER: All right.

What about that, Darrell Issa?

ISSA: Well, actually, in the case of the Baghdad airport, we've already moved our military flights to an airport north of there so that the Baghdad airport could do commercial flights again. These sort of arrangements are going on every day. We have talented people, including one of my own staff, that has taken a leave to go over there.

Many members of the staff in the Congress are on temporary assignment to help each one up link up to a minister. And the truth is, most of the ministers, the people doing the bureaucratic work, the day-to-day work, have already been in place, and they're doing their job. You hear about it all of time. So the Iraqi government is functioning at the lower and mid levels a lot more than people are giving credit for.

But back to the issue we're really dealing with, America is making a strong statement that we're not going to tolerate the kind of activities that went on in that prison. We are making reforms in that prison to make it much more transparent. And, more importantly, the path will continue leading up stream to anyone, at any rank, who had going to do with this policy going in place.

All of that's going to be covered fully so that the Arab world understands that this is not going to be tolerated. Additionally, the secretary of defense has been taking very, very strong response to it. And ultimately, I think the reason the president is so focused on, look, this man is doing a good job, is nobody can do a better job of putting this behind us than the secretary of defense, who very, very clearly knows how to get to the bottom of things and knows how to punish the people wrong, and has the confidence of every man and woman in the military. This is a secretary of defense that our fighting men and women believe is going to get them out alive.

BLITZER: Well, let me let Ellen Tauscher respond to that.

You are stopping short of calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, but do you support this notion that Rumsfeld is the guy who can move this defense establishment forward right now in the aftermath of this scandal?

TAUSCHER: Well, no one is irreplaceable. And I think that that is proven by the fact that we have such a significant chain of command in our military.

But I believe that the president wants the secretary to stay in. He can have the secretary he wants. But I don't believe we're going to get a change in the path that we're taking or the ability for us, frankly, get more international help if Secretary Rumsfeld is in there or, frankly, if this president remains in office for very much longer.

We are really, I think, in a situation where we need massive change in order to internationalize this issue. Where is the U.N. resolution that we are meant to be getting to legitimize this process that we're doing? I don't even know if we've seen a draft of a new U.N. resolution. This is a process that's been mired down and bogged down by people trying to save face, not trying to save lives.

BLITZER: Darrell Issa, one final question for you and then we're going to have to leave this subject, at least for the time being. You are one of the few members of the United States congress who's an Arab-American. So you bring to this issue of this prisoner abuse of Arabs at this Iraq prison, Abu Ghraib prison, a unique sensitivity, at least as far as American members of Congress are concerned, because you presumably understand how this will play in the Arab world better than a lot of others, including those of us who are not necessarily Arab-Americans.

What goes through your mind as you see the pictures of these Arab men abused the way they were?

ISSA: Well, Wolf, that's the most painful part, is that the way they were abused was targeted at their religion, at them being Arabs, and designed to demoralize them to the greatest extent. And in many cases, these people, they hadn't been tried and convicted. They were clearly people who may or may not have information, may or may not be guilty.

It is the most reprehensible behavior because it was targeted at exactly the people whose hearts and minds we need to win over. We can't fight a billion, 1.2 billion Arabs and Muslims. The only way we can win the war on terrorism is to win over the hearts and minds of the vast majority of these people.

So this is something that we to put behind us, but we have to put behind us by doing the right thing, making it clear that the United States is a country of laws. And we have respect for the rule of law. We will see it through this time, and we will make sure this doesn't happen again.

That's Congress' obligation. And as an Arab-American, it is one of my obligations to take a personal hand in making sure that this happens, because the Arab world is looking at us and saying, do we actually respect the laws, or do we just talk about them?

BLITZER: Darrell Issa, thanks very much for joining us. Ellen Tauscher, your Democratic colleague from California, thanks to you as well. A very good discussion here today.

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